10 Reasons Microsoft's SharePoint is like Gravity

According to Microsoft there are 125,000,000 SharePoint licenses sold so it is as pervasive as gravity. It is everywhere and like gravity it is not going anywhere soon.

In the right application (such as keeping things secured on terra firma) gravity is incredibly useful, as is SharePoint.

There are times however; high jumping, running, accidentally falling from a window when gravity is not exactly your best friend, ditto SharePoint.

If gravity is asked to do too much, more than it should like, say, safely landing an airplane all by itself it will gladly agree and go all in despite the somewhat dicey – crash site outcome. Same for SharePoint. Neither will offer up “no, this is not a good idea”.

Gravity is a force and the strength of the force due to gravity depends on the mass of the object it acts upon. SharePoint’s “force” or effectiveness is also based on the mass of information it is trying to control. The more information, the less buoyancy, speed and exactitude.

Bigger and heavier with both gravity and SharePoint equals slower. With SharePoint bigger in this sense is not the amount of users but the amount of information and images it has been forced to digest. Foie Gras comes to mind, don’t ask me why…

String theory calculations and equations posit that gravity should be way stronger than it actually is, that gravity is somehow “leaking”. Too many images stored in SharePoint when used inappropriately as a repository can also be viewed as “information leakage” because some are simply going to get away.

Physicists understand that Gravity is not the only force acting on the molecules of our atmosphere. Gravity is not the strongest force, either. Microsoft also now understands that SharePoint is not the ideal imaging ECM “force” or solution and have now completely backed away from that. This is why they have helped Certified Gold partners such as Hyland create such tight integration between SharePoint and OnBase.

If Gravity did not exist SharePoint wouldn’t either.

Gravity and SharePoint can be your best friend or your worst enemy depending on your need at any point in time for seeing eye to eye and collaborating on a project versus controlling a large (informational) mass while trying to avoid falling to the ground in a tussle with physics doing the gravity two step with too many documents on your back.